Attendance and TV Ratings for Memphis Tigers Football Up in 2023

The 2023-2024 athletic/academic year is shaping up to be a very good one for the University of Memphis. The women’s soccer team won their third straight AAC title, won a home NCAA Tournament game in front of over 2,000 people, and made their second consecutive Sweet Sixteen appearance. The men’s soccer team made their second straight NCAA Tournament appearance (the first time in history they’ve accomplished that feat) and hosted an NCAA Tournament game for the very first time, which they won in front of over 1,000 people. Additionally, at the time of the writing of this article, the men’s basketball team is 11-2 and ranked #15 in the AP Poll and is projected to be a 4-seed in the NCAA Tournament.

But perhaps the best news for the Tigers came on the gridiron. The Tiger football team posted a 10-3 record in 2023, their fourth double digit win season during the College Football Playoff Era (2014-present). During that era the Tigers have now gone to ten straight bowl games (though the 2021 Hawaii Bowl was canceled before the Tigers could take on the Rainbow Warriors). This year ended with a resounding win against Iowa State in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, the third straight bowl win for the Tigers, following 2020’s Montgomery Bowl win over FAU and 2022’s First Responder Bowl win against Utah State. To top it all off, it seems that the logjam on the money from the state legislature for various stadium projects in town has been broken with the City of Memphis preparing to transfer ownership of Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium over to the University of Memphis, which will allow for renovations to the stadium to proceed as the Tigers make another push for a bid into a power conference.

It should not be surprising then, given the on and off field success, that both the attendance and the TV ratings for the Tigers were up in 2023. Just how much were they up though?

Here are the TV ratings for the Tigers this year.

Overall, the Tigers averaged 954,125 viewers per game across eight nationally televised games this year (numbers for games on streaming services such as ESPN+ are not made available). That represents a 37% increase over last year when they averaged 696,000 per game over the course of six nationally televised games. In fact, this was the best year for TV viewership for the Tigers since 2019 when they went to the Cotton Bowl and averaged 1,814,200 viewers per game through ten nationally televised games. Along those same lines, this year’s Liberty Bowl against Iowa State was the second most watched game for the Tigers during the whole CFP Era narrowly edging out the previous Liberty Bowl meeting against Iowa State in 2017 (which drew 3,438,000 on ABC) and trailing only the aforementioned 2019 Cotton Bowl against Penn State (which drew a whopping 6,220,000 on ESPN).

But the TV ratings weren’t the only source of good news for Memphis football. Here’s the attendance for the Tigers this year.

Average attendance for the seven home games this year was 32,497. That’s a jump of 24% from last season when the seven game average was 26,196. In keeping with the TV ratings, 2023 was also the best year for Tiger football attendance at Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium since the 2019 season when they averaged 38,815 per game over seven games. While the crowd for the Iowa State game this year may have been down from the crowd at the Iowa State game in 2017 (57,266) it was still the largest crowd of the year and the largest home crowd for the Tigers since Memphis hosted SMU (and College GameDay) in front of 59,506 in 2019. It’s also worth noting that the final five home games all drew at least 30,000 fans which is the first time that many consecutive home games have cracked the 30,000 mark since the 2019 season when all seven games hit 30,000.

There is reason for more optimism for the Tigers in 2024. Next season is the first year of the expanded playoff which figures to give an automatic bid to the best Group of 5 team. With a number of key pieces returning next year, including QB Seth Henigan, Memphis could be in very good shape to put together a season to rival 2019’s Cotton Bowl trip. Attendance figures to be down next year with renovations to Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium and a home slate that is less than ideal. However, if the Tigers are true AAC title contenders (and thus contenders to be the Group of 5 bid to the College Football Playoff) the excitement and momentum for the program will be as high as it’s ever been. And that could roll nicely into the 2025 season when the stadium renovations are slated to be finished and perhaps catch the eye of one of the power conferences.